Politics Over Principle

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/opinion/politics-over-principle.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 11:56 AM
Subject: re: Politics Over Principle
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

  For fifty years, I've been a citizen of the United States, endowed by my Creator with certain inalienable Rights. With the signing of the new Defense Appropriation, that will be over. I'll  suddenly be a potential suspect terrorist, enjoying the mere appearance of Rights only until and unless our military decide to detain me indefinitely.  Surely such a change in our form of government deserves a bill of its own, to be debated (and rejected) on its own merits. President Obama doesn't have a line-item veto to reject this provision alone. So he'll have to veto the entire Defense Appropriation Bill. Maybe when Boeing, Ratheon and Northrup don't get paid for the weapons we don't need, their lobbyists will knock some sense into our Congress.

Barry Haskell Levine